For millions of young people across India, national secondary school leaving exams are far more than a simple academic milestone: they act as the critical gateway to competitive university admissions, future career trajectories and long-term socioeconomic mobility. This year, that high-stakes process has been thrown into chaos by a growing scandal over the newly implemented digital evaluation system for the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 exams, which serve approximately 2 million test-takers annually. The controversy erupted after one student’s viral social media complaint about a mismatch between his original physical physics answer sheet and the digital version uploaded for grading, triggering a flood of similar allegations from students across the country.
The system at the center of the dispute, called On-Screen Marking (OSM), was launched by CBSE with the stated goal of reducing human error in manual grading, cutting down on examiner workload, and boosting both transparency and efficiency in the grading process. Under the OSM framework, teachers score physical answer sheets that have been scanned and uploaded to a cloud-based portal, after which a proprietary software automatically calculates the final total marks for each exam. But instead of solving longstanding problems with inconsistent manual grading, students say the new system has introduced a host of new, potentially devastating issues that have tanked their final scores.
Common complaints from test-takers range from blurry, low-resolution scanned copies of answer sheets that made handwritten responses unreadable to entire missing pages of responses, incorrect cross-subject marking, and widespread mismatches between the original physical answer sheets and the digital copies uploaded for grading. The case that sparked national attention involved 12th grade student Vedant Srivastava, who alleged that his physics answer sheet was entirely swapped for another student’s work after he requested a re-evaluation. Srivastava posted on social media that the scanned copy provided by CBSE featured different handwriting and answers to questions he had never attempted, writing, “I studied for an entire year. I sacrificed sleep, peace of mind, outings, everything for these exams. And now I don’t even know whether my actual physics paper was checked. Do students really deserve this?”
Srivastava’s post quickly went viral, drawing hundreds of thousands of interactions and prompting thousands of other students to share their own stories of grading errors and answer sheet mismatches. Several days later, CBSE confirmed it had sent Srivastava the “correct copy” of his answer sheet, but provided no explanation for the initial mismatch. Screenshots released by Srivastava after the correction showed handwritten red ink markings on the sheet, which contrasted with the green digital check marks used in the official OSM process, raising further questions about irregularities in the system.
In response to the growing outcry, CBSE has stated that it remains committed to upholding a “fair and transparent evaluation process” and that all legitimate concerns related to scanned answer books and grading errors will be reviewed by independent subject experts through the board’s official re-evaluation mechanism. As of this week, more than 400,000 students have applied to access scanned copies of their answer sheets, while roughly 1.1 million have requested physical copies for verification. Some students have also reported technical glitches when trying to submit re-evaluation requests, prompting federal Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to deploy a team of technical experts from India’s top engineering institutes to support CBSE in resolving technical issues and ensuring a smooth re-evaluation process.
The CBSE controversy has gained even more national traction because it follows closely on the heels of a major scandal surrounding another high-stakes Indian entrance exam: the National Eligibility Entrance Test (Undergraduate), or NEET-UG, the mandatory entrance test for medical school programs across the country. Allegations of a widespread question paper leak in May led to the full cancellation of the exam for 2.28 million test-takers, a disruption that has been linked to multiple reported student suicides.
Opposition Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has seized on the twin controversies to criticize the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing the government of neglecting India’s youth and calling for the resignation of the federal education minister. Gandhi has claimed the national examination system is rigged, forcing students to turn to social media to seek redress for systemic failures. The education minister has not yet responded to Gandhi’s allegations.
Compounding concerns about the OSM system are recent security allegations from an ethical hacker who claims he found and exploited critical vulnerabilities in CBSE’s exam grading portal earlier this year. Nisarga Adhikary told the BBC he was able to crack the portal’s master password in February, gaining full access to student answer sheets, personal student records, and examiner accounts. “With that kind of access, one can tamper with the answer-sheets, change marks or even access peoples’ phone numbers and bank details,” Adhikary said. He added that he reported six to seven separate security flaws to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN), the federal agency responsible for handling cybersecurity incidents, via a series of emails, copies of which have been seen by the BBC.
CBSE has denied Adhikary’s allegations, stating that no security breaches have been detected on the portal used for official live grading work. The board claimed the URL Adhikary flagged as vulnerable was only a test portal that held no actual student evaluation data, marks, or personal information. Adhikary has pushed back on this claim, saying he was able to view real scanned answer sheets and verify a working examiner’s personal details after accessing the portal. “If this was a test portal, why was this information uploaded on it?” he asked. The BBC has sent formal queries to both CBSE and CERT-IN, and responses are still pending.
The overlapping scandals have put increased pressure on Indian education officials to address systemic flaws in the country’s high-stakes examination system, with parents and education experts questioning whether teachers received sufficient training and whether the digital evaluation infrastructure was adequately tested before being rolled out to millions of test-takers.